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On a Lack of Book Reviews

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ll notice I publish a lot of book reviews. Frankly, these are Goodreads reviews I cross post to my blog, but I get a lot of traffic here when I publish book reviews. So you might have noticed I haven’t written any in awhile. I wanted to address that.

I’m actually in the middle of a number of books right now, which is how I tend to read — I can’t read just one book at a time. Among the books I’m reading are Camus, A Romance by Hawes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haldeman’s Forever Peace, Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer by Huffington, and a couple of books by Frederik Pohl. That’s a lot, I know, and that’s one reason I haven’t written any book reviews. I read 20 or 30 pages in one book and then move on to another. The one I’m closest to finishing right now is the Camus book. I’ll probably be writing a review on it sometime soon. The Malcolm X book is interesting. It’s a required book in many high school and college classes, but I can’t figure out why. He’s just an immature narcissistic jerk, as far as I can tell. I’m only a third of the way through it, but he spends all of his time bragging about just what an asshole he was. I’d quit reading it, but I want to find out how he made his conversion to Islam and became the leader the country knew him as. So I guess I’ll continue. It’s irritating me though.

Another reason I haven’t written a review is there just aren’t any page turners in this group of books. The Hillary Clinton book was huge, but I couldn’t put it down. It was fascinating. I normally can’t put Phillip K. Dick books down. Some books you just have to read, you know? None of these books are doing it for me. They’re more of a chore, especially the Picasso one, which I had looked forward to. (It’s disappointing to read what an asshole he was….)

Yet another reason I’ve not written any reviews is I’ve gotten back into computer gaming. I used to be an avid gamer, particularly back in the 1990s. My favorite games remain Master of Orion 2, Civilization, and X-COM. They still make the Civilization series and I’ve recently started playing Civilization 5 and it’s been a whole lot of fun. I really haven’t played it for a couple of years. In fact, after playing this darn game for 20 years, last month I finally won for the first time! I won again last week. It’s been very cool. I’ve also found a game I had been into two years ago with an old work friend. It’s a game based on the classic X-COM called UFO: Alien Invasion and it’s near dead on, even an improvement on the original. It’s a free GNU game (like Linux — open source) which you can download from the Net. The last version I had broke on my Mac. Simply didn’t work. With my health problems last year, I just forgot about it, but remembered it a couple of weeks ago and downloaded a new version which works beautifully and I’m really enjoying it. The thing about these two games is they’re turn based strategy games that can take days and weeks to complete, so you can’t just sit down for 20 minutes and win a game. It takes awhile. So my reading time has really been diminished over the past couple of weeks. Some other games I’ve been playing include Air Attack, Hockey Nations 2011, Ships N’Battles, and Blackjack World Pro. I’ve recently gotten a golf game and a Star Wars game that look cool. I frankly don’t know when I’m going to find the time to play all of these games. There aren’t enough hours in the day!

Well, I guess that about covers it. I’m sorry if you’ve missed my book reviews. I have about 40 books I’m sitting on waiting to read, so more will be forthcoming, I promise. I just have to make the time and it would be helpful if some of them were real page turners. I’m actually holding a couple of Phillip K. Dick books back because I want to look forward to reading them later. I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season, and happy reading!

7 Responses to “On a Lack of Book Reviews”

Awanthi @ I Speak Awanthisaid

I think I’d go nuts if I tried to read more than one book at a time. If I’m being honest I typically usually have two books on my plate at any given time, but since one of those is typically food-related, the same rules don’t apply. At the moment I’m having a lovely time re-reading all my Ngaio Marsh books; she is such an under-celebrated author and yet she is awesome!

Awanthi @ I Speak Awanthisaid

Oops. I just realised my primary blog was set to my food blog and not to my _actual_ primary blog; thanks for liking my hot chocolate post. I’ve set it properly now. 😀

Well, I adore fiction (fantasy, murder mysteries, and historical are my favourites, with everything else galloping in after). I’m not a fan of romance or anything vampirical, though. I also have a deep passion for history, and love reading historical literature (non-fiction). I also read poetry.

I’m a writer of fantasy fiction myself, and I’m interested in people, their lives, and relationships. I will often read a book based on how much the character(s) grip me. For instance, my friends detest Maeve Binchy (she’s too mainstream for some of them), but I like reading her books because of the richness of her characters. Similarly, I recently read Firmin and adored it, because, well, how could you not love a literary rat? 🙂

It’s nice to know I’m not the slowest, at least. LOL! Just saw you have a book coming out via Main Street Rag. Good deal! Their magazine has published some of my work. I like what they publish. I hope it does well.

Damyanti Biswas is an author, blogger, animal-lover, spiritualist. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book, or baking up a storm.